November 26, 2007

The driveway and what had been the front of the home I lived in for five years until 2002, and its garage, now a gaping abyss. I look at the firefighter with only a garden hose, and recall the hundreds of times I stood on that exact spot, watering my plants with that same hose.

Two more photos to accompany my previous entry, because they are compelling and meaningful to me. And possibly to my many friends who walked across the threshold and down the three levels into this special house between 1997 and 2002. This is the kind of personal narcissism that leads so many blogs astray, and I promise to return us to our upright and locked, sunny, wildlife-filled position after tonight. But a highly unusual event like this one is worth a few more sentences, especially given the touching comments and emails I’ve received. Thank you all.

My heart goes out to the owners of the house. Above you see my former landlord standing dazed amidst the flattened, defeated rubble, in a photo that was the huge front page lead for this morning’s L.A. Times. And I feel terrible for the renter who had just moved in a mere two weeks ago and lost all of her belongings. That could have been me, and it was so many others this weekend. Close to 60 homes were destroyed in the firestorm and many, many badly damaged. The numbers represent an enormous percentage of a small neighborhood set among state parkland that was idyllic and will be again, with time and patience.

The weather is brisk here on San Juan Island, and our wood stove is a primary heat source. It’s an uncomfortable sensation to peer into these photos of fire ravaging my past and someone else’s present, and then rise from my chair to purposely stoke the neatly contained blaze in the living room.

Well put, Paul. In addition to moving to a wonderful new place we wanted to be, we moved from a place that, between such constant natural disaster risk and such constant traffic, had become too stressful for us. I’ve been so unspeakably happy and calm since living in this more northerly, rural clime.

Glenn Buttkus said,

ELEGIAC was such a “moving” piece of music. Thank you Alex, for including it. I have written poetry over the years that lament a person, a place, or a time long past. Is that lead instrument a cello? Cellos make me so very emotional. Yo Yo Ma is my god. Another title for the piece might have been, ELEGOS: Song of Mourning. Elegies are never great fun, but they do serve for us to revisit our secret rooms of emotion.

I, too, lived in California for ten years while endeavored first to be a professional actor, and then switching vocations to become a special educator, to work with the blind. I was born and raised in Seattle, so I pined for the Northwest for the entire decade living in several places all over Southern California. I spent a lot of time up on the Angeles Crest, trying to see a tree that wasn’t dying of smog poisoning.

They say that there are “several” celebrities that live up there in the San Juans. Do some of you visit with each other? Is there an artist’s colony of sorts there?

Yes, all us high-falutin’ celebs gather once a week around a cauldron, drinking potions and chanting in tongues. And then we go home and clean the kitty litter and do a load of laundry

I live a rural-block away from a very cool celebrity whose music I love: Steve Miller. I haven’t run into him yet but look forward to when I do, if only to be the one-gazillionth middle-aged fan to tell him how his music was the underscore for my teen years.

In addition to my house (!), yes, there is a colony up here of sorts: a fabulous residency fellowship for visiting scholars and artists on the Friday Harbor Laboratories property, called the Whiteley Center: